Author:

Tags:

Share this Article

Last month I wrote an article for LabourList explaining the background to the blacklisting scandal in the construction industry and calling for a public inquiry to ensure that the blacklisted victims receive justice. Today I am renewing that call.

In the space of a few weeks the blacklisting saga has moved forward rapidly.

Jim Kennedy UCATT’s National Political Officer and I gave evidence to the Scottish Affairs Select Committee on October 30th, as part of their inquiry into blacklisting. During our evidence we revealed how the Consulting Association’s (the organisation which undertook construction blacklisting) invoices revealed that the blacklisting activity of construction company Sir Robert McAlpine increased dramatically, when they began building the Olympic Stadium in the summer of 2008.

Last week the joint unions involved in the blacklisting campaign GMB, Unite and UCATT wrote to all Labour MPs, providing details about how they could contact the Information Commissioner’s Office to check whether they had been blacklisted. This week (Tuesday 27th November), Ian Kerr the Chief Officer of the Consulting Association, who is the only person convicted of blacklisting and then only for data protection offences, gave evidence to the Select Committee.

Kerr’s evidence was illuminating as he described how the Consulting Association conducted its operations but it also raised many further questions.

On one point he was clear – blacklisting did take place on the Olympics before the Consulting Association was shutdown. Kerr said: “Robert McAlpine, Balfour Beatty and possibly Skanska” were involved in blacklisting workers on the Olympics.

He also confirmed that blacklisting was also regularly undertaken on many PFI hospital projects and that at the time of the Consulting Association’s demise, talks were ongoing about how blacklisting would operate on Crossrail.

Kerr’s confession demonstrates beyond doubt that taxpayers’ money which construction companies should have been using to build the Olympics and other major public projects, was being siphoned off to pay for the blacklisting of workers.

One of the greatest causes of concern has been the revelations that information received from the police and the security forces was used to blacklist workers. Kerr drew light on this by saying that he had not directly colluded with the police and the security forces and that this information had been provided to him by the main contacts in the construction companies.

Kerr also alluded to special attention being applied to Irish nationals, a huge section of the construction industry, seeking work on Ministry of Defence projects.

This raises further serious questions about how and why senior people at the blacklisting construction companies were involved in receiving and passing information about construction workers with the police and the security forces. We need answers about just how far the state was involved in colluding with the blacklisters and ruining the lives of construction workers.

Kerr also revealed for the first time that blacklisting was not confined to trade unionists and left-wing activists. A separate file was established on environmental activists following the high profile campaigns to block new roads including at Twyford Downs and the M11 extension.

UCATT has always believed that the Consulting Association was not the only blacklisting organisation in construction.

Kerr confirmed that he was aware of at least one other organisation that ran a blacklisting operation and that other “individuals had accrued information”. Kerr also said that he believed that blacklisting was continuing “in some form or another.”

Given these revelations it is essential that the whole truth of this scandal which ruined the lives of many construction workers is revealed once and for all.

UCATT are currently lobbying MPs to sign Early Day Motion 609 tabled by Steve Rotheram which calls for a public inquiry into blacklisting and for blacklisting to become a specific criminal offence.

Further details about the blacklisting scandal and information about how to contact your MP to ask them to sign the EDM can be found at www.ucatt.org.uk/blacklisting.

It only takes a minute to contact your MP and help finally win justice for the blacklist victims.

Latest

The pistol has been fired and the race has begun. For many Labour activists door knocking and phone banking has become a regular part of evenings and weekends as the fight to return a Labour government on 7 May intensifies. Over the past few weeks two topics of doorstep conversation have leapt out at me. One is the passion felt by people of all ages, particularly the older generation, for the NHS. The second, predictably, is public concern over immigration. […]

Last month David Cameron called for all 18- to 21-year-olds who have failed to find a job or a place in training to be forced to undertake community work. Under Tory plans those aged between 18 and 21 who have not had a job for six months will be barred from claiming benefit unless they agree to start an apprenticeship or complete community work. The plan is designed to ensure that the 50,000 young people “most at risk of starting […]

Labour candidates for Mayor will be trying to fund their campaigns in all manner of ways – but Christian Wolmar (the transport expert who joined the race first and remains the only candidate who isn’t an elected politician) has gone down the crowdfunding route. Wolmar is trying to raise £3,000 for his campaign by next week – and has currently raised nearly half of that sum. Although as with all crowdfunding, he must raise the whole sum or he gets […]

Yvette Cooper, the Shadow Home Secretary, has asked an urgent question in the Commons about abuse allegations at Yarl’s Wood. Yarl’s Wood is an immigration detention centre that opened in 2001. Ever since then guards (who come from private company Serco, which runs the facilitiy) are have faced serious accusations that there has been ongoing mistreatment of the people detained in the facility. This includes reports of sexual abuse and degrading treatment. On Monday, Channel 4 aired a documentary which had […]

75% of Labour PPCs want to see Trident scrapped, according to information collected by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). CND have surveyed 79 Labour prospective parliamentary candidates (PPCs) – which includes both current MPs and new candidates. Of those asked, 75% said they wouldn’t vote to renew Trident. This is roughly a quarter more than those who said the same in a ComRes poll for the BBC Sunday Politics in September last year (which surveyed 73 people). Meanwhile, in the CND […]